Question. I have a friend whose hands shake slightly from a childhood bout with scarlet fever. Would a smartphone with a physical keyboard be better than a virtual, onscreen one?

Answer. This person would need to try out a bunch of different keyboards in person to know for sure, but I think we can rule out phones with physical keyboards upfront.

Those have become hard to find — of the 31 smartphones Verizon Wireless lists online, only six include physical keyboards, and even a company as fond of that concept as BlackBerry went with an onscreen keyboard on its new Z10 phone. And I wouldn't recommend a physical keyboard in this case anyway.

"Real" keys can't take advantage of many of the clever tricks you can play with the virtual kind to allow for more accurate input. For instance, the iPhone makes individual keys more and less sensitive to your touch based on what it sees you typing — if you type "th," it will be more generous in assuming that a tap close to a vowel key was meant for that.

On Apple's mobile devices, you only have that one choice of keyboard, with voice dictation as a somewhat inelegant fallback option — you don't see what iOS heard you say until you tap the microphone button a second time to end the dictation session.

(The quirky, free alternative iOS keyboard Fleksy, which uses a complicated predictive algorithm to allow you to type without looking, doesn't replace that, so you have to copy and paste from that program into others.)

Android allows for more choice as well as some confusion. Google's own keyboard feels as accurate as Apple's, although that may be the product of all the time I've spent in it, and its voice dictation adds each word as you say it.

The current 4.2 release of Android — sadly unavailable on most Android phones — adds a smart "gesture typing" option, sort of a cursive for keyboards, in which you trace a path over the letters you want to write. I use that often enough on my Nexus 4 that I find myself trying to gesture-type on my iPad mini.

For reasons I've never been able to figure out, many Android vendors discard the onscreen keyboard they get from Google for free to bundle their own, lesser alternatives. The auto-correction on the Samsung Galaxy S III was so pushy — it even tried to insert its own ideas of what I wanted to write as I was backspacing over its mistakes — that I wanted to throw the phone against a wall.

But you don't have to put up with the default keyboard that came with your Android phone. You may find other options came installed — open the Settings app, select Language & Input, and see what else is listed there.

You can also install somebody else's keyboard. Two popular add-ons, Swype and SwiftKey, each offer a form of gesture typing (the former popularized that idea long before Google got around to adding it) and can also learn more about your vocabulary by scanning your e-mail, tweets, Facebook updates and more, should you allow them.

There are so many options to configure on the average phone that you may not think to tinker with its selection of sounds. Please do — in iOS and Android, open the Settings app and select Sounds or Sound, respectively — or you will soon enough find yourself grasping for your phone when you hear its ringtone or alert sound come from somebody else's phone.

Changing those sounds to something more creative will avoid that problem and reduce the odds of you inflicting it on your fellow phone users. Plus, some of those sounds can lose their appeal pretty quickly. That cute whistling noise Samsung phones make to notify you about each new e-mail, Facebook comment, Twitter reply and other, lesser developments got a lot less charming after the first 200 times I'd heard it.